Google News Rank Boosters
Last time I gave some tips on how to rank better in Google News. Today I’ll be giving some more tips that are still straight from Google Developer Programs Tech Lead, Maile Ohye.
According to Ms Ohye some of the best practices you should adopt include:
Keeping the article body intact – Don’t break the article body. Place ads and other stuff on the sidebar or at the bottom of the article but not in between paragraphs!
Put dates between title and body – This makes it easier for Google to determine recentness of your articles. This is also really useful in terms of usability. One of my pet peeves is having to look for the date/time stamp when reading online articles/posts, especially when reading older articles because I want to be sure I know how old or new an article is when citing that article.
Smart Titles – Titles matter so think about your titles really hard. It matters in SEO so make sure you squeeze in your most important keyword(s) in there. It also matters to readers so make sure it is both informative and catchy.
Separate original content from press releases – As mentioned in my previous post, Ranking in Google News, “opinions, editorials, satire, press-releases and subscriptions are not eligible to lead [story] clusters” so make sure you separate them and give them their own section/page. Of course you should place the original articles on the main landing page and not the other way around.
Publish informative unique content – When it comes to publishing, whether internet publishing or in whatever form, we will never tire of reminding everybody – Content is still and always be king!
The use of unique permanent URLs with at least 3 digits - This helps Google determine that the page contains an article and is not a static HTML page. This has roots in the traditional way news sites/publishers choose their URLs. However, if your pages does not have this kind of URL you may skip this and simply do the next tip.
Submit a news sitemap – News sitemaps are beneficial because it will make it easier for the news crawler to find your article and re-crawl that same article to look for updates (re-crawl happens in 12 hours). Aside from this it contains the meta-data (i.e. keywords, publication date) needed by Google to help them determine not only relevancy of your article to their story clusters/categories but also determine the other ranking factors without having to rely on Google’s extractor.
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Just found this blog and it is a very good one I must admit! Sine good points mentioned here and I’ll be on the look out for your new content!
Ashley
I am fairly new to all this, so the advice above is very much appreciated & will save a lot of time deciding what to write & how to structure articles. I have saved your site to my favourites & will check back on a regular basis.
Many thanks
I can not believe update is in place, and how much work has been done, 3-months will be sweating at 100%. Beginning of the year is not the best
I got second article here for Google news. In first article you have highlighted two important points. This one makes a lot of significance in terms of what to do? Thanks again for such a nice article. Keep going Hannah.